The Information Age is upon us. Access to vast quantities of information through a variety of different communication systems are changing the way people work, entertain themselves, and communicate with each other. For example, as a result of increased telecommunications competition mapped out by Congress in the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act, traditional cable television program providers have evolved into full-service providers of advanced video, voice and data services for homes and businesses. A number of competing cable companies now offer cable systems that deliver all of the just-described services via a single broadband network.
These services have increased the need for bandwidth, which is the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. More bandwidth has become increasingly important, as the size of data transmissions has continually grown. Applications such as movies-on-demand and video teleconferencing demand high data transmission rates. Another example is interactive video in homes and offices. Moreover, traffic across the Internet continues to increase, and with the introduction of new applications, such as the convergence of voice and Internet data, traffic will only increase at a faster rate. Consequently, carriers and service providers are overhauling the entire network infrastructure—including switches, routers, backbone, and the last mile (i.e., the local loop)—in an effort to provide more bandwidth.
Other industries are also placing bandwidth demands on Internet service providers, and other data providers. For example, hospitals transmit images of X-rays and CAT scans to remotely located physicians. Such transmissions require significant bandwidth to transmit the large data files in a reasonable amount of time. The need for more bandwidth is evidenced by user complaints of slow Internet access and dropped data links that are symptomatic of network overload.
Many industries use radio frequency technology to transmit data. Conventional radio frequency technology employs continuous sine waves that are transmitted with data embedded in a modulation of the sine waves' amplitude or frequency. For example, a conventional cellular phone must operate at a particular frequency band of a particular width in a prescribed frequency spectrum. Specifically, in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission has allocated cellular phone communications in the 800 to 900 MHz band. Cellular phone operators use 25 MHz of the allocated band to transmit cellular phone signals, and another 25 MHz of the allocated band to receive cellular phone signals.
Therefore, there exists a need for an apparatus and method to increase the bandwidth of wire and wireless networks.